Dame Maggie Smith's advice on acting: ‘If you want to do it, then do it.’
Dame Maggie Smith’s son Chris Larkin recalled her advice to him about entering the profession when he spoke to the Chichester Observer a few years ago.
Appropriately he was at Chichester Festival Theatre, a place dear to both him and his late mother, whose death has been announced today.
Chris, son of Dame Maggie and the late Sir Robert Stephens, spent a summer in the 1980s working in the tent (predecessor to the Minerva) and returned the following year to be part of the stage crew in the main-house. The experience was the best possible grounding, he recalled.
“It was mammothly hard work, humping all the sets around, but it was great fun. The stage crew were all really young and enthusiastic. They had to be, the pay was so terrible! But you learn so much.”
And seriously, just the act of sweeping the stage was a great way to feel rooted in the business: “When you have had to do that and then you are actually acting on the stage, you know that you have worked your way up.
“I knew then that it was what I wanted to do. I went to a school where there was not very much acting. I had no idea about it, and people just said that if you think you want to do theatre, learn about the theatre first. It was much more useful at the age of 18 than going off to drama school. I went to drama school later, and it was much more valuable then. You have got to live a bit first and then go to drama school.”
And it was great to be on his local stage once again: “I grew up in Fittleworth, and this was the theatre that we used to come to.”
Chris was speaking a few years ago when he returned to the CFT for a stint in the Minerva in Hugh Whitemore’s award-winning play Stevie.
As for following in the footsteps of such illustrious parents, Chris insisted it really wasn’t terribly complicated: “Their view was very much ‘If you want to do it, then do it.’ They didn’t get involved. They were at arm’s distance when it came to what myself and (brother) Toby (Stephens) wanted to do.”
One thing Chris did do, though, was change his name, partly out of necessity. There was already a Chris Stephens in Equity. He was asked to come up with three other suggestions, and responded with Chris Hutton and a couple of others he no longer remembers.
As it happens, all three were also already taken. When Equity contacted him, he had to come up with another option off the cuff. He looked at the book on his desk that he had been reading. It was by Philip Larkin.
“It’s a good job it wasn’t by Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky!”
Chris returned to the theatre a few years later in the mid-90s to appear in a star-studded When We Are Married, sharing the stage with actors including Leo McKern, Dora Bryan, Dawn French and Alison Steadman.
“When you go into a room and there are so many big names, you think there are going to be big egos, but it just wasn’t like that at all. I was straight out of drama school, and it was a very happy time.”